Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) was a sexist, papist, xenophobic, racist, colonialist, misogynist, monarchist baron in a republican France, a friend of Adolf Hitler and a classist. He did not invent the modern Olympic Games, but he was the first president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), coined the term Olympism, as early as 1901, five years after the first Games in Athens, and theorised about the foundations on which the Olympic movement is still based: autonomy of sport from political and commercial interference and the principle of co-optation of IOC members among the highest social spheres and economic elites of all countries, thus constructing it as a sovereign organisation to which States and sports federations submit.
His figure was key, making lobbying among the great powers, for the resumption of the Games after the Great War, in Antwerp in 1920, when there was widespread disillusionment with the pacifist ideal of the mythical Olympic Truce and the consideration of the Games as an unarmed confrontation between the best of the world’s youth. Despite this, despite having also invented the Olympic flag with the five rings before the Great War and all the Olympic ceremonies and rituals, and despite having been born in Paris into a noble family, at the time of the Commune, neither the capital of the Seine on the occasion of the third Olympic Games that it hosts, nor the IOC, which is holding its 142nd session here under the presidency of Thomas Bach, offer in his honour anything other than disdain, doubt and oblivion.
Last February, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, turned a deaf ear to the request that the baron’s remains be buried in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men in Paris, a ceremony that would have meant his civil canonisation just the year of the return of the Games to the capital, 100 years after the last time. The request, politely supported by Bach, had been made two years earlier by the academic and Goncourt Prize winner Erik Orsenna and Guy Drut, Minister of Sports under President Jacques Chirac, Olympic champion in the 110m hurdles in Montreal 76 and member of the IOC. Drut was not given any official reason for the refusal, although the fact that not even the Olympic baron’s own family had requested his burial was cited as reasons at the time. pantheonization and that his body, by his own choice, is buried in the Bois de Vaux cemetery in Lausanne (Switzerland), where, in 1915, he moved the IOC headquarters and his residence from Paris, an affront, and his heart to Olympia, Greece, enclosed in a white marble column erected in his honour, a monument that he himself inaugurated in 1927, 10 years before his death.
News published at the time also recalled Coubertin’s relations with Nazi Germany, his support for the 1936 Berlin Games and how he accepted Hitler’s proposal, never considered, that he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They also brought to light some of his writings defending colonialism and the ethnic superiority of some races over others: “Without reducing them to slavery, of course, and not even to a softened form of servitude, the superior race is perfectly justified in denying the inferior certain privileges of civilized life.”
It was at the Paris Games that the IOC proclaimed equal participation between men and women, 50% for each gender, news that would surely have made Coubertin vomit, a man who in numerous writings claimed that the only role of women in the Games should be to present medals to the champions. “The role of women in the world must be what it has always been; she is the companion of man, the future mother of the family,” he wrote, before proclaiming that the Games should be reserved for men and that female participation would be “impractical, uninteresting, unattractive.” The use of the term Olympic by Alice Milliat, a pioneer in the organisation of women’s sports competitions, when the so-called first Women’s Olympic Games were held at the Pershing Stadium in Vincennes, Paris, in August 1922, had deeply upset him. “In the Olympic Games, their role must first and foremost be to crown the victors,” he repeated. At the 1924 Paris Games, the last in which he served as IOC president, 135 women and 3,089 men competed in sports such as golf, swimming, horse riding and tennis. Women were not admitted to athletics until Amsterdam 28.
As if the memory of the founder of Olympism were a nuisance in the 21st century.
However, Coubertin’s figure was already badly treated during his last years at the head of the IOC, the interwar period of great social and cultural mobilisation. He was then a sixty-year-old who seemed not to understand his times. At a time when France and Germany were at odds over the payment of reparations for the First World War, he tried in every way to get Germany to participate in the second Paris Games, 24 years after the first. In his biography, Daniel Bermond writes: “A black legend has grown up around Coubertin. He did everything possible to perpetuate it.” “This otherwise enlightened mind was quick to support the strongest prejudices of his time, and represented all the ambiguity of the society in which he lived,” he adds. Coubertin barely survived, but did not disappear completely from the Olympic movement. He was named honorary president for life of the Olympic Games, despite the fact that his candidate for successor, his compatriot Godefroy de Blonay, was defeated in the election by the Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour, and he had to fight to stop the latter considering him “an authoritarian dead ancestor.”
In Paris, there is neither a heart nor a grave, but a plaque engraved with the Olympic rings at number 20 on the rueOudinot, 7th district, Saint-François-Xavier metro station, half an hour’s walk from the Sorbonne. “Pierre de Coubertin, teacher, historian, humanist, innovator of the Olympic Games and founder of the IOC, was born and lived here, where in 1894 he established the first permanent headquarters of the International Olympic Committee.” After Paris 1924, Coubertin never attended another Olympic Games.
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